Are you from the armed forces, a defence veteran or a family member of the either? If yes, you must go on reading this. A Pune-based startup is helping you fly for cheaper.
¡®udChalo¡¯ focuses on delivering convenience, affordability, and accessibility to a large captive customer group of about active 2.8 million armed forces and veterans and their dependents.
Varun and Ravi founded udChalo in 2012, a booking portal which provides discounted domestic flight tickets exclusively for the Indian armed forces, ex-servicemen, dependents, and SSB candidates. It offers services both offline and online.
Their physical counters are present inside Army cantonments, at the SSB and ASC centres in Bengaluru, DIAV in Delhi, BEG Centre in Pune, and MH Kirkee.
Almost 50,000 seats on domestic flights go vacant every day. In spite of it, more than 5,000 jawans from the Indian armed forces travel in general compartment everyday due to unavailability of seats. Their family members and veterans also face similar problems.
Ravi Kumar says that a Jawan often gets last-minute leave sanctions and the MCO quota has limited seats. Due to the unavailability of seats, jawans end up travelling in unconfirmed tickets or the general compartments of overbooked trains. This amounts to around one lakh people from the Armed Forces travelling by railways every day.?
Seeing the plight of army men, Kumar came up with the idea of a startup udChalo.
It is a consumer tech startup with the motto of 'Servicing the service men'. The brand focuses on delivering convenience, affordability, and accessibility to a large captive customer group of about active 2.8 million armed forces, veterans, and their dependents.
In 2015, udChalo started with its ticketing services after seeing the plight of jawans and soldiers during travel. This Pune based platform started by helping book domestic flights at a 50 per cent discount to the Indian armed forces, veterans, dependents, and SSB candidates.
"On one hand, we were helping the ailing aviation industry, who traditionally relied only on business and leisure travellers, to get a new customer base, and on the other, we were making travelling more convenient for the forces," Ravi Kumar, Founder & CEO udChalo told The Logical Indian.
"For the longest time, the group of 30 million armed forces along with dependents and veterans were never considered as a target audience by the airline industry. This segment too wasn't ready for a shift. While we introduced the service, we fought a battle of acceptance for change as many were just content with the traditional way of travelling," he added.
It took years for udChalo to convince defence personnel to be open about air travelling irrespective of their ranks and designation in their service. The startup started off by booking only about 1200 air tickets in the year 2012 and over the years, it booked about 10 million tickets.
Kumar said that the COVID-19 pandemic came with its other set of challenges. Due to travel restrictions, there was an initial dip in the revenues, but the company bounced back to close to pre COVID sales as travel restrictions were lifted.
"Now, we have expanded the business beyond ticketing with financial services, RealTech and e-commerce," he said.
"It was interesting to know that due to posting in remote areas, soldiers frequently miss the ITR filing date leading to fines. Therefore, we launched ITR filing services and soldiers can file their ITR through our website and offline counters," Kumar said.
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